Methane is important in future energy schemes. The main strategies for storing and transporting methane are compression, liquefaction, and physical adsorption in synthetic porous materials. Here, we show that methane can be stored in a hydrated form using natural amino acids such as leucines as effective promoters to form methane hydrate with a high formation rate and a high capacity. In addition, the methane hydrate formed from the L‐leucine solution dissociates without foaming phenomenon. We also showed that the heavier hydrocarbons in natural gas can enhance the promoting effect of L‐leucine.

We demonstrate that l‐methionine, a natural amino acid, can be used to dramatically enhance CO2 uptake kinetics in the formation of CO2 hydrate without the use of energy‐intensive mixing technologies or environmentally harmful chemicals. To the best of our knowledge, l‐methionine is the most effective promoter to enhance CO2 hydrate formation (at a concentration of 0.2 wt %, the gravimetric capacity reached up to 356 mg g−1 in 1000 min, and t90 (the time to achieve 90 % of this capacity) was only 15 min). We also present a tentative explanation for the promotion mechanism of l‐methionine in the formation of CO2 hydrate from the point of view of structure–property relationship that will help search for more effective promoters. Our results may offer the possibility of practical application of hydrate‐based CO2 capture and storage technology.

The emission of CO2 has been considered a major cause of greenhouse effects and global warming. The current CO2 capture approaches have their own advantages and weaknesses. We found that free-flowing hydrated sodium carbonate (Na2CO3) powders with 30 wt % water can achieve a very high CO2 sorption capacity of 282 mg/g within 60 min and fast CO2 uptake (90% saturation uptake within 16 min). The results suggest that the alkaline solution resulting from the dissolution of partial Na2CO3 can freely attach onto the hydrated Na2CO3 particles, which provides an excellent gas–liquid interface for CO2 capture, leading to significantly enhanced CO2 sorption capacity and kinetics.

Chinese herbs are rich resources for the discovery of new environmentally friendly promoters for methane hydrate formation. We demonstrated that 20 out of 300 kinds of Chinese herbs were highly...

No abstract